I know that criticizing Katherine Harris, Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Florida, is sorta like shooting fish in a barrel. But Lord, does she ever flop arond in that barrel!Her latest nutquest is in an interview with a Florida Baptist periodical, wherein she goes way out of her way to attack the very idea of separation of church and state, and to suggest a religious test for candidates for office:

The Bible says we are to be salt and light. And salt and light means not just in the church and not just as a teacher or as a pastor or a banker or a lawyer, but in government and we have to have elected officials in government and we have to have the faithful in government and over time, that lie we have been told, the separation of church and state, people have internalized, thinking that they needed to avoid politics and that is so wrong because God is the one who chooses our rulers. And if we are the ones not actively involved in electing those godly men and women and if people aren’t involved in helping godly men in getting elected than we’re going to have a nation of secular laws. That’s not what our founding fathers intended and that’s certainly isn’t what God intended….If you are not electing Christians, tried and true, under public scrutiny and pressure, if you’re not electing Christians then in essence you are going to legislate sin. They can legislate sin. They can say that abortion is alright. They can vote to sustain gay marriage. And that will take western civilization, indeed other nations because people look to our country as one nation as under God and whenever we legislate sin and we say abortion is permissible and we say gay unions are permissible, then average citizens who are not Christians, because they don’t know better, we are leading them astray and it’s wrong.

Nobody ever accused Katherine Harris of any original thoughts, so we’re offered up sort of a right-wing theocratic greatest hits: If you’re Christian, you have to be obsessed with banning abortion and gay rights. Any political action that does not focus on these eccentric causes is un-Christian. And any silly constitutional scruples about religion-based policies offends the Founding Fathers, and leads to “legislating sin.”I don’t know whether this pronouncement is more offensive for its ignorance of Christianity, its ignorance of the Founding Fathers (particularly Jefferson, for whom freedom of and from religion was paramount in his constitutional thinking), or its affrontary to the significant majority of Americans who do not share her particular views of God’s Will for Public Policy.Harris’ rant reminds me of a moment back in the 1980s, when the House was doing one of those silly late-autumn round-the-clock sessions. As always, a junior Member from the majority was in the chair, and it happened to be Rep. Barney Frank at some wee-hours moment when a Republican was making a speech about America’s status as a Christian Nation. Frank quickly replied from the chair: “If this is a Christian Nation, how come some poor Jew has to get up in the middle of the night to preside over the House of Representatives?”Katherine Harris decided a long time ago that her strategy for heading off any primary competition for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate was to combine total fidelity to the Christian Right with her GOP folk-hero status as the woman who helped hand the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000.But she hasn’t quite gotten the Bushian knack of pandering to the Christian Right without coming right out and endorsing theocracy. There are actually still a lot of Baptists particularly, and conservative evangelical Christians generally, who are a little queasy about condemning the separation of church and state–a doctrine that has obviously had a lot to do with the freedom and growth of evangelical Christianity in this country, and used to be a mainstay of Baptist identity as well. Katherine Harris misses all the nuances, and like a woman sporting a lavish mink coat in warm weather, manages to raise tackiness to new levels every time she goes public.

The big news out of Washington today is that the FDA, after years of politically motivated foot-dragging, suddenly approved over-the-counter sales of the emergency contraceptive Plan B, a so-called “morning-after” pill. According to the Washington Post, this decision was part of a deal that will allow Bush FDA appointee Andrew von Eschenbach obtain a permanent position (the nomination had been held up by Sens. Hillary Clinton and Patty Murray precisely to obtain this result).Predictably, social conservatives blasted the decision and the underlying deal as another sell-out by the administration to business interests.

The group Concerned Women for America has led the opposition to wider availability of Plan B, and its president, Wendy Wright, criticized the administration last week for its apparent change of position. She called for von Eschenbach’s nomination to be withdrawn, citing his “pandering to political activists and a drug company.”

Whatever its motivation, the decision will presumably take distribution of Plan B out of the hands of those self-styled Pharmacists of Conscience around the country who have refused to fill prescriptions for panic-stricken and clock-watching women seeking emergency contraception.I guess now we can expect to see a new movement among Clerks of Conscience who refuse to ring up the over-the-counter drug.One thing is clear. Over on the demand side of the equation, the decision should encourage Men of Conscience to exercise a little responsibility for their own contributions to potential unwanted pregnancies by trotting their own butts down to the pharmacy and buying Plan B for their worried partners. Let them deal with the disapproving glares at the drug store counter for a change.

After reading Matt Taibbi’s second straight Rolling Stone column about the satanic conspiracy I am apparently working for here at the DLC, I’ve decided he’s a lot of fun, much like a particularly twisted roller coaster ride. You never quite know where he’s going next, but he gets there pretty fast, with all sorts of dizzying upside-down turns.Taibbi’s Big Insight, with which I suspect he will bludgeon readers regularly, is that American politics generally, and Democratic Party politics in particular, are fundamentally rigged by “the holy trinity of the American political establishment — big business, the major political parties and the commercial media.” In Taibbi-land, moreover, this Establishment is not simply benighted or corrupt; it is fundamentally determined to destroy democracy by denying actual voters any say in the political affairs of either party.And here’s where the roller coaster ride gains momentum. Taibbi goes off on a loop-de-loop suggesting that the Holy Trinity is the only thing standing between Hillary Clinton’s obscure primary opponent, Jonathan Tasini, and a Lamont-style upset. And then, suddenly, he goes upside-down:

It’s a simple formula for running one-half of American politics; you decide on John Kerry two years before the presidential vote, raise him $200 million bucks, and let CNN and The New York Times take care of any Howard Deans who might happen to pop up in the meantime.

The People, according to Taibbi’s logic, would have chosen Dean as the Democratic nominee if the Holy Trinity had not already decided on Kerry.This hypothesis is pretty interesting, to say the least. Maybe I’m just old and have a fading memory, but I seem to recall a very different situation in late 2003, the period just before The People had any say over the Democratic nomination for president in 2004–when the Holy Trinity really had a lot of power, and it was all about buzz and conventional wisdom and money.This last, pre-voter phase of the nomination contest was actually the high point of the Dean campaign and the low point of the Kerry campaign. Unless I’m just imagining this, Dean was kicking butt on the money front; he was raking in endorsements; the mainstream media had all but crowned him as the nominee; even Al From and Bruce Reed felt compelled to make it clear they would loyally support him if he won. Kerry had been gleefully, joyously left for dead by a Media Establishment that never liked him to begin with. Those bigfoot political reporters who had not already called the nomination for Dean, before a single vote was cast, were hyping Edwards or Clark.Then the Iowa Caucuses happened, in a state and on a terrain that were entirely friendly to the kind of activist-based, antiwar, energized People Power of the Dean campaign. Yet the Doctor began his decline while John Kerry rose from the dead. You’d have to be stone crazy to think the Holy Trinity scripted this series of events two years in advance.Don’t get me wrong: I’m not bashing Dean here. His 2003-2004 take on Iraq–it was a mistake, but one that the U.S. was morally required to carry through to victory–would today put him on the right wing of Democratic opinion on the war. Moreover, Dean’s campaign was very important in changing how campaigns are organized, run and financed, largely for the better. We’ll never know whether he would have been a better general election candidate than Kerry.But what we do know is that for whatever reason, the Democratic electorate consistently chose John Kerry over Howard Dean, even when money, media, and the party establishment dictated otherwise. And we also know that people like Matt Taibbi who respect The People when they agree with him, and consider them disenfranchised and deluded when they don’t, are just as elitist as anybody in DC. But Matt has to take us on quite a crazy ride to square that particular circle.

I may not agree with Charles P. Pierce of TAPPED about St. Paul, but I sure do agree with his assessment of a peculiar op-ed by Michael Barone posted at RealClearPolitics. It’s sort of a Cliff Notes version of the ancient conservative argument that Moral Relativism is Destroying America, linked to a vague neo-McCarthyite suggestion that the shadowy academic missionaries of said Relativism are The Enemy Within in the war against jihadism.After rightly praising Barone’s enduring contributions as co-founder and editor of The Almanac of American Politics, Pierce ends his post by saying:

Sorry, Michael, but I’m going to be subjecting the next Almanac to what you would call “fine-tooth-comb” analysis, just to make sure you haven’t slipped any unicorns in there.

Well, I had the same thought last year, and took a close look at the 2006 Almanac in Blueprint magazine, concluding that Barone the conservative pundit was beginning to seriously undermine Barone the brilliant political analyst. It’s a sad devolution; here’s hoping Barone somehow snaps out of it and regains his grip.

In a presumably tongue-in-cheek comment on a Baptist church that cited the First Epistle to Timothy as grounds for dismissing a woman from a Sunday School teaching post she’d had for 54 years, Charles P. Pierce of TAPPED proposed a little radical surgery on the New Testament:

Life would be so much better for a lot of us folks of faith if we could just run St. Paul’s sorry ass out of the New Testament the way they snuffed the Gospel of Thomas. Granted, the Book of Revelation has caused an awful lot of trouble, but it has the saving grace of being gorgeously written. Not so with the Bill O’Reilly of Tarsus.

Now there’s plenty of precedent for proposals to expurgate troublesome bits of scripture. The great heresiarch Marcion wanted to get rid of the Old Testament along with three of the four Gospels. Luther expressed a desire to expel the Book of Revelation as “fundamentally un-Christian.” And more recently, Thomas Jefferson published a “Bible” that junked all the “dogma” interspersed amongst the sound ethical teachings.But before Mr. Pierce gets too far with his anti-Pauline crusade, he should be aware that there’s a lot of doubt about the authorship of I Timothy. In fact, the late Fr. Raymond Brown, perhaps the preeminent New Testament scholar of recent years, suggested that about 90% of biblical experts thought that Paul did not write this epistle.This scholarly consensus does not, of course, cut much ice with biblical “inerrancy” fans, including the offending Baptist church in question, since the (probable) anonymous author of I Timothy identified himself as Paul. As my own grandmother back home in Georgia used to say when I ventured my own youthful sandbox theories of religion: “The Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it.”But given Paul’s knack for allegorizing and reinterpreting the Law and the Prophets in the epistles, like Romans, that are indisputably his, I have a sneaking suspicion that despite his reputation as the favorite source for conservative abuse of scripture, Paul himself was no fundamentalist. And given his true legacy as the great and revolutionary advocate of Christian liberty, it makes little sense to consider him a conservative, either.

Yesterday’s New York Times included a brief but useful summary by John Broder about Sen. John McCain’s progress in reinventing himself from the brave maverick of GOP politics into the Chosen One of Republican elites, including many key veterans of George W. Bush’s two campaigns.I’ve long been a skeptic about McCain’s ability to propitiate the conservative ideologues that still own the Republican Party without losing the reputation that would make him a formidable nominee in 2008. But he’s off to a pretty good start, given his consistent front-running status in early GOP ’08 polls; his love-fest with prominent Bushies; and the high esteem he still enjoys from many mainstream media types. And lest we forget, the combination of very high and relatively positive name ID and insider backing is what lifted McCain’s former nemesis, George W. Bush, to the nomination in 2000.Broder’s summary of McCain’s pivot does not mention one factoid that the photo accompanying it illustrates: McCain yukking it up with attendees of the Iowa State Fair. He famously skipped the Iowa Caucuses in 2000, after conspicuously disrespecting the Ethanol Subsidy that ranks just behind the State Fair’s Butter Cow sculpture as Iowa’s Most Sacred Cow. McCain has now flip-flopped on ethanol, and is spending a lot of time in Iowa.McCain’s pivot, of course, most depends on the panic of Republicans who see the White House slipping away in 2008, and figure only a “maverick” like the Arizonan can save their bacon. The same underlying dynamic may doom a McCain general election candidacy, and thus his “electability” appeal, particularly if he continues to flip-flop on domestic issues, while championing the Bush administration’s disastrous course of action in Iraq.And even if McCain goes into the presidential cycle as the clear GOP front-runner, there’s no question many conservative movement types will continue to cast about for an alternative. At one point, Sen. George Allen of VA looked like a strong possibility for the Anybody-But-McCain (ABM) effort, but his sparse positive qualifications are clearly being overwhelmed by his current troubles. Right now the big debate about Allen is whether he’s a racist obnoxious jerk, or an equal-opportunity obnoxious jerk. No less an authority than Charlie Cook is already saying Allen’s presidential star has fatally fallen, and for that matter, Georgie is now in danger of losing his Senate seat.At present, the insider buzz about GOP alternatives to McCain revolves around Mitt Romney of Massachussets. Aside from the improbability of the Right readily embracing a guy once thought of as a northeastern moderate, whose most notable recent accomplishment was signing a quasi-universal health insurance bill, there’s the Mormon Issue. Last year Amy Sullivan wrote an important article examining probable conservative evangelical concerns about a Mormon candidate, but the problem could go deeper, since the unusual nature of LDS doctrines could discomfit some Catholics, mainstream Protestants and secular conservatives as well as evangelicals.The real darkhorse for the ABM mantle remains Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. Expect a boomlet to form around him at some point in the near future.

Not that long ago, one of the prime White House/GOP talking points was that Americans just didn’t appreciate how well they had it in terms of the national economy. With polls showing persistent unhappiness with Bush’s economic stewardship, W. and his minions fanned out across America touting growth, productivity, inflation and unemployment stats, and discounting concerns about job and pension insecurity; energy, health care and college costs; the federal borrowing binge; and general pessimism about the future of the U.S. economy.Well, Reuters reported today that Bush was “huddling” with his economic advisers to consider “options” for dealing with higher interest rates, a cooling housing market, higher unemployment, and fresh inflation fears, aside from all those continuing problems the GOP keeps telling Americans they shouldn’t worry about.I’m guessing one option won’t be to suggest to voters they should suck it up and accept some sacrifices because there’s a war on in Iraq.

Next week will mark the tenth anniversary of the landmark 1996 welfare reform legislation. And as a host of former opponents of this legislation now attest, it largely worked.No, it did not drastically reduce income inequality in the United States. Yes, its initial success depended in no small part on a red-hot late 1990s economy that in particular supplied an enormous number of entry-level jobs. Certainly, there should be a continuing debate over how best to help the dispossessed in our society get into the economic and social mainstream. And moreover, given the currently sluggish and insecure national economy, and the decision of congressional Republicans to reauthorize the 1996 act with no debate and in the dark of the night, with toughened work requirements for single mothers and little or no resources for child care–current law deserves some new scrutiny.But what’s annoying to me, having been heavily involved in the welfare reform debate of the mid-1990s, is the revisionist history being peddled by Republicans, who continue to claim the 1996 legislation as their own, when it’s just not true.Check out this line from a National Review editorial commemorating the anniversary of the 1996 act:

President Clinton vetoed conservative welfare reform twice before Republican resolve finally secured his signature on legislation that held cash welfare to a five-year limit and imposed work requirements on its recipients.

This has long been the view from the Right–and some precincts of the Left–about what happened in 1996: Republicans sent their bill up three times, and the third time Clinton signed it on the advice of the triangulating Dick Morris, in order to guarantee his re-election.Didn’t happen that way.The first congressional welfare reform bill sent to Clinton was a House-based package that disqualified unmarried mothers–obviously a large segment of the welfare population–from any public benefits. He vetoed it. The second bill was Senate-based, and essentially turned the entire public assistance system into a block grant, with no real incentives for finding jobs for welfare recipients, and every incentive for states to just slash eligibility and call it a day. Clinton, calling the bill “tough on kids, weak on work,” vetoed that one as well.The final bill was indeed a compromise. It eliminated the personal entitlement to public assistance, but did not disqualify big categorties of Americans (other than legal immigrants, a provision which Clinton vowed to change, and did in no small part before he left office), and created significant incentives for states to help welfare recipients find jobs immediately. Clinton famously agonized over signing this bill, but the idea that he simply caved in to Republicans is not at all accurate. Ten years later, the revisionist history of welfare reform is, like the bizarre belief of conservatives that Ronald Reagan created the 90s boom, just another bit of delusion in the service of propaganda.

There’s been an odd blogospheric interchange over the last 24 hours about why Democrats are particularly offended by Ann Coulter. It began with a piece by Elspeth Reeve on the New Republic site suggesting, if I’m not mistaken, that male liberals demonize Coulter because of some inverted desire to sleep with her. Over at TAPPED site, Ezra Klein and Charles Pierce joust about Reeves’ hypothesis (follow the links from Ezra’s last post to read the exchange), with all sorts of side discussions of TNR generally.As a Coulter-disparager who doesn’t watch much TV and is only dimly aware of her “leggy blonde” persona, I have to interplead that you don’t have to watch or listen to Ann Coulter to intensely dislike her. My own major attack on her was based on her written words. In reacting to her poorly researched arguments and her contemptible efforts to claim the entire Judeo-Christian tradition for her particular ideology, I did not really care if she was a “leggy blonde,” a squatty four-foot-ten brunette, or for that matter, a Man named Ann. I haven’t spent much if any time looking at her on the tube, and given her vicious and casual slurs on the truth and on people like me, I would not find her lovely if she were a certified Super-Model.Then again, I was a fan of Dolly Partin’s music before I had any idea what she looked like.Now that I’ve been informed of her exceptional sexiness, I won’t hold Ann Coulter’s looks against her, but I’ll be damned if I have to cut her slack because of an attraction to her that I do not have. There’s nothing sexy about hate and lies.

Like many of you, no doubt, I’ve been following the wide-ranging debate about the domestic political implications of the British terrorist bust of last week. It has come as no surprise, of course, that Republicans and their conservative allies have seized on the foiled plot to claim, for the thousandth time, that it shows how important it is to have a party focused on national security in charge in Washington, even if the consequences of its Iraq policies are looking more disastrous every single day. (The GOP’s comcomitant campaign on the theme that Joe Lieberman’s loss in Connecticut proves there’s only one party committed to fighting terrorism, absurd as it is, is Part B of its longstanding implicit argument that however much Bush is screwing up, he’s screwing up with the right intentions). But I do wonder if the revelation of an advanced plot to replicate 9/11 on a large scale isn’t going to unravel the whole line of “reasoning” that has reinforced the persistant gap between public feelings about Bush’s performance in Iraq, and the GOP’s general reliability on national security. We’re all familiar with the “flypaper” theory, so often articulated by Bush himself, that whatever else is going on in Iraq, the insurgency there is drawing jihadist attention and resources away from attacks on the U.S. (“We can fight them here or we can fight them there,” as Bush routinely says). And I personally think this factually crazy contention has been far more important to Bush and the GOP than most of us would like to accept. Back during the last presidential campaign, I became convinced, mainly through conversations with undecided voters back home in Georgia who would up voting for Bush’s re-election, that the most powerful thing the incumbent had going for him was a rough and unsophisticated argument that went like this: Some Arabs came here and killed a bunch of Americans. George Bush went over to Iraq and killed even more Arabs. Since then there have been no attacks. He must be doing something right.Anything and everything that reminds Americans that the Iraq War has not done a thing to reduce the terrorist threat against the United States will erode that argument, and with it, the GOP’s belief that any and all concerns about national security will benefit it at the ballot box. To the extent that clearly focusing on what they would do to deal with the actual terrorist threat undermines both parts of the Republican argument, while connecting public unhappiness with Iraq with residual concerns about terrorism, Democrats should hammer away on this subject every day. This administration has been a national security disaster. The “flypaper” has worn out, leaving us with a horrific mess in Iraq, an energized and growing jihadist threat, and a country more exposed than ever to terrorism. It’s time for a dramatically new direction.